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“Common sense” without growth, curiosity, or perspective eventually becomes conservatism and bitterness. I moved on.
As a child I loved Roseanne Barr so much, and just the knowledge of her existence out there—as a fat, funny, defiant, loud woman—bolstered my fat, funny, shrinking, quiet adolescence. It never occurred to me that twenty years later Roseanne would call me a “fat bitch” on Twitter for critiquing misogyny in comedy, which she perceived
as “advocating censorship.”
“Dumpster fire” has emerged as the favorite emblem of our present sociopolitical moment, but that Gervais quote feels both more apt and more tragic as metaphor: the Trump/Brexit era is a rich, famous, white, middle-aged man declaring the world to be in decline
the moment he stops understanding it.
Adam Carolla is a multimillionaire who holds the Guinness World Record for “most downloaded podcast” and has published two New York Times best-selling books. Clearly the snowflakes have done their worst. Carolla isn’t angry because he’s being silenced; he’s angry because he’s being challenged. He’s been shown the road map to continued relevance, and it doesn’t lead straight back to his mansion. He’s angry because he’s being asked to do the basic work of maintaining a shared humanity or else be left behind. He’s choosing the past.
It’s baffling that Gervais can have so much reverence for physical evolution and so little for intellectual evolution. He might find trans people silly, but you know who doesn’t? Teenagers.
I’m being hard on Ricky Gervais not because his attitude is extraordinary but because it is common. Not because I think he and the other ostensibly left-leaning men who succumb to this trap are just like Trump but because I believe they aren’t. Or they don’t have to be.
Amelia and I realized that the only people who felt free to talk about abortions in specifics were those advocating for its eradication—and their specifics were lies and propaganda. Why weren’t we owning our own stories? Why were we caving to a stigma that we didn’t even believe in?
pleased with the conversation. Amelia and I received lots of messages that opened with the phrase, “I’m pro-choice, but…” One reality that SYA had kicked to the surface was that the pro-choice movement was really, REALLY not on the same page about how people are supposed to talk about their abortions. The anti-choice people, on the other hand, were predictably monolithic in their, um, criticisms of SYA.
We fall into the trap of qualifying certain abortion restrictions as more extreme or more inhumane than others, when the unshakable reality is that if you are a person who is unable to access abortion for any reason, your state is total disenfranchisement and your right to life has been stripped from you. Even when we insist, however valiantly, that “abortion is health care,” we are playing into the devastating anti-choice fiction that abortion is anything less than liberty itself.
You cannot legislate abortion out of existence—you can control only who has safe abortions and who has dangerous ones, who is considered a full person in the eyes of her government and who is a state-owned incubator, who is free and who is not.
The chasm between who people claim to be and how they actually behave is vast. We have to fill that chasm up with truth so we can climb out of it.
And SYA is just one in a whole network of abortion storytelling campaigns, fighting for truth while the stalwarts on the front lines—led by women of color, as has been the case in every major movement for human rights this country has ever seen—keep doing their work, one day after the next.
Personal storytelling is an engine of humanization, which is in turn an engine of empathy. This is a long game, but if we can change enough minds, voter suppression will lose its power, gerrymandering will be pointless, the electoral college can’t stop us.
Whether or not girls play video games—and more specifically whether we are qualified to have opinions about them—has become a major culture war fixation over the past decade, uniting aggrieved male gamers against a common enemy that just so happens to look exactly like their moms, mean teachers, all the girls who have ever rejected them, and Hillary Clinton.
The internet makes neighbors of us all, and my conscience demanded that I put some virtual real estate between myself and the befuddled, racist mobster who was seemingly determined to dismantle and loot the republic. If seeding nuclear war wasn’t a violation of Twitter’s terms of service, Twitter wasn’t a service I wanted to endorse.
I keep vowing to never write about internet trolls again, but unfortunately my country’s hard dick for ignoring the screams of the marginalized has made internet trolls not just culturally relevant or politically relevant but historically relevant. So here I am—one more troll chapter.
I am writing this chapter, against my will, because people still love to scoff at the significance of Twitter and its culture of abuse. It’s “just” social media. Tweets are “just” tweets. I pale at the need to explain this, but “just” tweets such as “THE RIGGED AND CORRUPT MEDIA IS THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!,” when tweeted by the president, actually matter quite a bit, because Trump’s endgame, communications-wise, is to silo his supporters to the point that he is literally their only trusted source of news, opinion, and truth—and Twitter is the platform on which he talks to them. It matters.
It’s a strategy I recognize: telling people the lies they’re hungry for, constructing an alternate reality, refusing to back down in the face of facts, spamming the discursive field until people just accept that it must have some legitimacy in the “debate”—Trumpism is the internet troll playbook.
Instead—on Twitter and in Trump’s America—most people just sit, bewildered, on the high road and try to get on with their lives. It doesn’t work. I promise.
Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocalypse. So I left. I wrote jokes there for free. I posted political commentary for free. I answered questions for free. I taught Feminism 101 for free. Off Twitter, these are all things by which I make my living—in fact, they make up the totality of my income. But
on Twitter, I did them pro bono, and in return, I was micromanaged in real time by strangers; neo-Nazis mined my personal life for vulnerabilities to exploit; and men enjoyed unfettered, direct access to my brain so they could inform me, for the thousandth time, that they would gladly rape me if I weren’t so fat.
Those of us who pointed out that online harassment was politically motivated—compounded by race, gender, and sexual orientation—as I did in 2013, for example, were accused of being “professional victims” trying to leverage our paranoid delusions to censor the internet. That defamation has never been retracted or atoned for even after the revelations that an army of Russian Twitter bots functions as the Trump administration’s propaganda wing and the alt-right, essentially a coalition of antifeminist, white supremacist online harassment campaigns, recruits angry young men to Trumpism by framing
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It’s farcical. It’s literally a farce. Here’s an idea: maybe instead of trying to troubleshoot the Nazi factory inside a clown’s asshole, we just let it go.
But in January 2018, I realized: it was too late. I’d forgotten to log back in. More than a year had passed. It was all gone. It’s as though a great wind came and blew my problem novel into the river. It’s as though I ate a very good sandwich without taking a picture of it. Sometimes it is okay to just let things go.
I did not call myself a feminist until I was nearly twenty years old. My world had taught me that feminists were ugly, angry, and ridiculous, and I did not want to be ugly, angry, and ridiculous. I wanted to be cool and desired by men, because even as a teenager I knew implicitly that pandering for male approval was what women were supposed to do. It was my best shot at success, or at least safety, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to see that success and safety, bestowed conditionally, aren’t success and safety at all; they are domestication and implied violence.
To put it another way, it took me two decades to become brave enough to be angry.
wrote it. She was reading from an article I had written in Jezebel in 2013 called “If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”
If we lose either way, why the fuck shouldn’t we just let our anger out?
Is there a woman who has lost her
temper in public and didn’t face ridicule, temporary ruin, or both? Can you think of one? Solange? Britney Spears? Sinéad O’Conno...
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Feminism is the collective manifestation of female anger. Men suppress our anger for a reason. Let’s prove them right.
Yeah, I’m a witch and I’m hunting you, and so on, but catching you doesn’t liberate fat people any more than trapping one fox makes chickens immortal. This kind of witchcraft, unfortunately, isn’t magic.
wearing a MAGA hat is a form of trolling, to “trigger” the libs and the feminists, because if there’s one legacy Trump is leaving to children (besides an irreparably ravaged ecosystem, a nation stripped of civil rights protections, and maybe another war), it’s the gamification of harm.
The myth of the “liberal elite” strategically frames liberal values—environmentalism, racial and gender equality, gay and trans liberation, immigrants’ rights, the social safety net—as inherently frivolous, dishonest, a joke. By extension, the people who would benefit from the actualization of those values are “fake” Americans—the nation’s most vulnerable groups being called decadent effetes by the most feckless, corrupt, undeserving legacy hires history has ever seen, people who have all the advantages in the world and still need to buy their kids’ way into college.
stigmatization of care itself. It’s not just caring about the environment that’s effeminate and therefore despicable, it’s caring about anything. It’s care.
The modern right loves to quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a “real” activist, while deriding Black Lives Matter. They claim to support social justice in the abstract but hate “social justice warriors.” They’re all for freedom and equality, they say, but sneer at the mechanisms that might actually help get us there—affirmative action, deplatforming Nazis, reparations, voting rights for felons, prison abolition, respectful adjustments to language—as bleeding-heart pandering to the dreaded “political correctness.”
Today, the anti-PC set frames political correctness as a sovereign entity, separate from real human beings—like an advisory board or a nutritional label or a silly after-school club that one can heed or ignore with no moral implications—as though if we simply reject political correctness we can keep, say, the Washington Redskins without harming native communities. But the reality is that there’s no such thing as political correctness; it’s a rhetorical
device to depersonalize oppression.
Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what “political correctness” means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered—not because it “offends” them or hurts their “feelings” but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer lang...
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I did not go to the WTO protest partially because my mom told me I couldn’t and partially because I didn’t understand it but primarily because I’d been taught that when ordinary people try to do activism, they look stupid.
We know that lax gun laws turn male rage into massacres. We know that we have about ten years to mitigate irreversible, catastrophic climate disaster. There is no longer any pretense among the intellectually honest that the people who have enabled this president’s rise to power are anything but a white supremacist organized crime network and its willing dupes. It’s increasingly clear that borders are ghoulish.
Tomorrow can be the first day. The witches are coming, but not for your life. We’re coming for your lies. We’re coming for your legacy. We’re coming for our future
